It’s better for all of us to engage with people who aren’t like us
By Lethbridge Herald on November 30, 2024.
Dan O’Donnell
I have a friend who recently moved back to Lethbridge from Victoria.
Like a lot of professionals from Western Canada, she had moved out to the island for the mild winters, ocean views, and a comfortable lifestyle among other reasonably well-off retirees: cafes, long walks, and great bookstores.
But now she was back.
I ran into her one day while walking my dog and asked her why she’d returned. She’d grown up in Lethbridge, and I was afraid it might mean a family illness.
“No,” she told me. She was back because she’d had enough of that comfortable life.
“It just wasn’t real out there.”
What she’d missed about Lethbridge — and couldn’t find in Victoria — was the messiness of life out here.
The mix of people, politics, and perspectives that can make life in our city both maddening and, well, real.
Victoria, in contrast, seemed too easy. Her neighbourhood was full of people who thought and lived like her.
There was too little challenge. It was too easy to be sure she was right.
In Lethbridge, she thought, you are more likely to be neighbours with someone who doesn’t share your opinion or tastes: monster trucks beside hybrids, newcomers alongside locals. A complex mix shaped by different origins, beliefs, and life-experiences.
This doesn’t mean we don’t cluster. We have wealthy neighbourhoods and poorer ones. There’s a large homeless population. High child poverty. We struggle with reconciliation.
It’s not perfect. Sometimes it isn’t even good. But for all our problems, we can’t avoid each other. Can’t avoid stepping out of our bubbles.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently.
My family follows politics fairly closely and we’d run a friendly pool on the results of the U.S. election.
I didn’t do very well. I thought Harris was going to win. Big League.
Partially this was hope — I preferred Harris to Trump and thought she’d be better for the country.
But partially it was because I thought there was a hidden female vote that wasn’t showing up in the polls, in much the same way it had been missed during the 2022 midterms. Most of my colleagues — conservative or liberal — seemed to be thinking along similar lines, as were the columnists I read most closely in the newspapers.
My kids did much better. They both correctly predicted Trump would win and gave him most of the swing states. The only difference was that my daughter thought Trump would win the popular vote and my son thought he might not.
One of the reasons for this, I think, is that my kids see more people who live outside of their bubbles.
My daughter is writing her PhD on U.S. politics and has a much wider acquaintance among conservative activists than you might otherwise expect of somebody living in liberal Boston.
And as a union organiser and pest-control technician in Montreal, my son meets people from across the economic and political spectrum every day — from blue collar colleagues to his sometimes extremely wealthy customers.
When I was growing up, neighbourhoods were much more mixed economically than they often are now. On my street in Scarborough, we had professors, a guy who played for the Leafs, people in the trades, factory managers, and floor supervisors — a mix like you’d never find nowadays. Toronto wasn’t as ethnically diverse then as it is now and women worked far less frequently outside the house. But from a political and economic perspective, it was far less of a monoculture than you’ll find in many places in North America today.
In the last 20 to 30 years, we’ve seen a massive sorting of the population along lines of education, income, and occupation. Around the world, people tend to know fewer and fewer people who do not have similar incomes or share their tastes and politics. I
t’s difficult to break down these barriers, and easy to let social media drive us further apart. But it’s better for us all when we have to engage with people who are not like us and do not share our beliefs.
And, as my friend might say, more real.
Dan O’Donnell is Chair of the English Department at the University of Lethbridge. The Department of English hosts open mics and other creative writing activities for students and the community every month. For details, visit: https://www.ulethbridge.ca/artsci/english/open-mic
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Couldn’t agree more Dan. The biggest issue today is that when having a conversation today and disagreeing with someone is that in a large number of conversations you attract a label. In other words the word disagree has been replaced by “offended”. However, when everyone is playing from the same hymn book your friend saw what she needed to do. Get an other book.
nice one, buck – great to see positive traction for you on this!
great perspective and well shared!
a couple of thoughts come to mind: how is that we seem to feel we are always so dead on correct, until we come to realise we were wrong (how many times have we each experienced this, no?); tolerance is grace, up the point where our rights are being upended.